Hacker News Reader

Comment by evannyx | Hacker News Reader

why is this on HN?

The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I've always found the above troubling.

It seems obvious to me anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity will quickly transform the site into interesting news, but not hacker news.

Perhaps if it was a hacker's instead of one's?

Perhaps, but I think that in general, people who search for things that satisfy their intellectual curiosity are very much overlapped with those who are hackers (even if their hacking is not necessarily applied to technology).

As long as the content is interesting and the discussion is respectful and intellectual (which it currently is), then I think it's fine. If the quality of the site begins to degrade with popularity, then it can always be made more restrictive.

I would agree with this. I wouldn't call myself a hacker in the traditional sense of the word. I dabble in HTML and CSS but other than that I'm not much of a programmer. I am here, however, because the articles that come up are interesting and the discourse that happens in the comments section is always high minded and interesting.

Coming to visit Hacker News exclusively over a place like Reddit has been a breath of fresh air. I hope things like this article keep coming up alongside posts about hacking more specifically.

"things like this article" are exactly why reddit is no longer the way it once was. You will destroy HN with your wish.

So flag it.

Not true. This article could easily have been on Reddit in the first year.

What ruined Reddit was (a) an influx of 14 year olds, who (b) were allowed to continue to behave as they had on Digg or wherever else they came from.

But wasn't the influx of 14 year olds driven by general interest articles, which very slowly got less interesting and more general?

How could that slow boil be prevented?

I think the 14 year olds were attracted by a sense of lawlessness, most visible in the long, highly editorialized titles and the trollish comments.

It wasn't so much general interest articles that signalled the decline of Reddit as partisan political ones. I.e. articles that didn't merely involve politics, but were instances of it.

BTW, let me add that by "14 year olds" I mean people who behave like 14 year olds. Actual 14 year olds are welcome here so long as we can't tell.

For the record, I was 15 when I started reading Slashdot.

It's easy to say that the ideas and hackerdom I found there significantly changed the course of my life.

Here's to today's 14- and 15-year olds!

Political (not policy) cheer leading is an excellent indicator that someone can't think.

Hopefully, as long as we keep HN free of politics we'll avoid redditization.

Actually I think it's the lack of moderation. Reddit was (is) very proud not to be moderated, and look where it got them.

I've seen you moderate submissions here, and I appreciate it.

Unusual and interesting perspectives on the world's cultures in my mind definitely satisfy the criteria of intellectual curiousity.

I've always found the above troubling.

It's been the definition of on topic for about a year and a half, and the site's still fine, so it seems to work.

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In his defense, I don't think he was suggesting it's either spam or egregiously off topic.

What bothers curmudgeons like me and him is the gentle slope towards Everybody News.

I was worried about that over 6 months ago, and in that time it hasn't got worse then it was then, so heres hoping it stays that way ! (just a single data point, but its something !).

Do you think it is "sliding" over time? Or are you just (rightly so) being vigilant ?

I do have a subtle feeling it's sliding but that's very likely just my paranoia.

Also, the title of the submission is poorly worded, suggesting that the Arab producers were asking the question.

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